


Five Easy Ways To Not Harass People Over Fictional Ships

by skulls_and_stripes



Category: No Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Sexual Harassment, Inspired By Tumblr, Inspired by Real Events, Second person POV, Tumblr, vent - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:40:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23750077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skulls_and_stripes/pseuds/skulls_and_stripes
Summary: Are you a ~nasty anti~? Are you trying to figure out why so many shippers seem to see you as a bully, a monster, or a harasser? Do you want to be able to interact with fandom spaces safely, without any unnecessary discourse? Then, here's a guide for you: Five easy ways to not harass people over fictional ships.It really is that simple, isn't it?
Kudos: 4





	Five Easy Ways To Not Harass People Over Fictional Ships

**Author's Note:**

> whoo i am absolutely gonna get roasted for this story. which is probably for the best because it'll give the nasties a reason to stop reading my other fics lol.
> 
> besides, a while back I needed a story like this, just like. anything like this on this website to tell me that I wasn't completely alone in my opinions. and there might be other people that need a story like this, so hopefully this will help someone.

**#1: Just Don't**

Seriously, this isn't rocket science.

You're scrolling through Tumblr on a Tuesday morning, as the rain pours outside. It's the sort of weather that you would pretend not to like but secretly enjoy, with the calming smell of rain and the excellent excuse to use your favourite Pokémon-themed umbrella. Your parents would never let you go out in this weather just for the sake of going out, but under normal circumstances there would always be _something_ that might need done -- a quick trip to the local store, most days. The problem is that it's mid-April, 2020, and nobody is allowed out of their homes unless necessary.

So, instead of being outside having fun, you're scrolling through Tumblr. Or rather, you're near-constantly refreshing Tumblr in the hope that somebody will post something soon. It's late afternoon for you, which you're guessing must be sometime between midnight and three in the morning in America, judging by the fact that all of the mostly-American blogs you follow are dead silent. Your friends don't return your messages, and you're sick of playing Mario Kart for the sixth time today, so you have a look through the tags for one of your favourite characters.

This isn't as entertaining as you expected, because Tumblr is a curious site that combines a user-base that mostly posts images and a website that takes approximately seven to ten business days to load images in a peculiar way that leaves absolutely nobody happy. A lot of the images that finally do load are just the character's artwork accompanied by a mildly relatable quote, or an in-game screen-cap of him saying something mildly funny. Most of it, as per the Tumblr community, is fanart in varying degrees of quality, ranging from a stick figure doodle made for the sake of a meme to an amazing work of art that you'd quite like to put on your blog, but you're hesitant to reblog it because the original poster doesn't describe themselves as an artist, it's not tagged as "my art" or a variation, and you _swear_ you've seen that image outside of Tumblr before.

And then you see it.

It's a ship fanart, showing him kissing the main female protagonist from the game. You cringe. Isn't he meant to be twenty-five? Yes, there was a line in the game that said he was, and the girl -- she's twelve, isn't she? Well, if you're being technical, she's only stated to be twelve when you pick the male character, but she's _clearly_ meant to be twelve -- thirteen, maybe, if you're being particularly generous. And even ignoring the exact numbers, just based on this fanart alone, it's clearly an adult and a child -- she's significantly shorter than him, with childlike proportions and a huge head and wide eyes, and he's wearing formal, professional clothes and ranting in a speech bubble about some geology thing that no child would realistically have knowledge of. 

You cringe. You feel really uncomfortable.

But, what can you do? The artist is allowed to make whatever they want. You quickly scroll past and try to erase it from your mind.

You simply don't go onto their blog and send them vile messages. That's how easy it is to not harass them. That's _all_ you have to do.

...Right?

**#2: Just Blacklist the Tags**

A few photos of the same ship later, you give up. It's a surprisingly popular ship, because the man is almost famously attractive among young female fans, and with how little we know about the protagonist's personality it's only natural that the fans would project themselves onto her to write a self-insert fanfiction without being accused of the main character being a Mary-Sue, forgetting her age in the process. When your computer gives up on Tumblr being a functional website and all of the images are stripped down to a gradient that gives you a vague idea of what colours the actual picture may or may not use, you go back to your dashboard.

Nobody's posted anything.

Partially because you still feel a little uncomfortable, and partially because you're bored, you go into the settings and add the ship tag to your blacklisted tags. You add the shipping of the adult man with the male player character as well, just to be safe. You never felt a need to blacklist the tags before, because none of the people you follow post content related to it, but it's nice to know you won't see it without wanting to. While you're adding to your blacklisted tags, you add "Under 17+ DNI", which is the tag one of the blogs you follow uses for sexual jokes. You didn't have it blacklisted before because the tag used to be "Under 16+ DNI", because the blogger updates the tag with their own age so that they're not tagging something as "minors dni" when they themself are a minor. Why the age-old "NSFW" isn't simple enough, you can't imagine.

Tumblr seems to have decided that you're allowed to see images instead of gradients now, which is something it does from time to time, if the planets align correctly on the third Thursday after the full moon. Searching for the character again would be boring, though, because you've already seen all the recent posts about him; so instead you search for the fandom itself. You see several gifs from the anime adaption, which is somewhat annoying to you -- why would gif-making be such a popular art form on a website that glitches when faced with gifs? More importantly, why does this website glitch when faced with gifs?

You also see a weirdly large amount of sexual content.

No outright porn, luckily, but a lot of stuff that comes close. Fanart of girls in swimsuits posing with a wink and a hip turned toward the camera. A cosplay that uses a heavily stylised interpretation of the character's canon outfit, with her short skirt even shorter and her barred midriff exaggerated to show half of her breasts and half of her hips. A fanart that edits her outfit in a similar way, except with almost comically large breasts. 

This is weird. You've got basically every possible tag blacklisted -- from the basic "NSFW" to the very specific "Under 16+ DNI" to the various acidic fruits from that month-long period after the updated community guidelines where people thought they would have to abandon their "NSFW" tag in favour of the warning systems from fanfic sites of the early 2010s, because all it took was a few out-of-context photos of the brand new flagging systems mistaking some sand for a pair of boobs and everyone was left completely convinced that anything tagged with a recognizable warning for sexual content would be automatically purged.

So, out of curiosity, you glance in the tags for some of these photos. They're tagged with the fandom name, and sometimes the character name, and often something like "art" that makes you wonder whether the original poster actually made the fanart or if they just saw it and thought it would be nice to put on Tumblr dot hellsite. Certainly not anything that could realistically be blacklisted without preventing you from seeing a huge amount of perfectly innocent art.

Well, maybe it's just a weird fandom. They are infamous for regularly sexualising the pre-teen protagonists. You go back to your dash. Still nobody has posted anything, not even an appropriately funny tumbleweed gif. You could play Mario Kart again, but you're sick of it after a couple weeks of quarantine. Out of curiosity, you type "Mario kart" into Tumblr's search bar, hoping for maybe some fanart from the scattered Mario fans and some funny relatable text posts about god damn blue shells. Or maybe a post suggesting a date idea in which the person who loses at Mario Kart should give the winner head, which of course is not tagged as anything that you could blacklist.

Honestly, you don't really get the big deal about the Blue Shell. It's annoying for whoever's in first place, yes, but it adds fun to the game. It gives the players that are just behind, lagging in second or third place, a chance to catch up. And for the player in first place, it adds an extra challenge, adding the list of everyone's power-ups to the list of things you need to be near-constantly aware of. Just hit the reverse button when you see someone has a blue shell and let whoever was in second place take the blow. It's annoying when you don't notice quick enough, sure, but it's not half as bad as the ones you can't do anything about, like lightning or a star-powered driver behind you or Rosalina porn.

...Why is there completely untagged Rosalina porn here?

**#3: People Can Write Whatever They Want**

When, out of morbid curiosity, you click on a fanfiction advertised as being a real-person high school AU fic about a boy band in which one of the band members is a freshman, and another is a senior who has a yearly tradition of picking a freshman to sexually harass and touch without consent, which based on the tags you're guessing ends in a romance, you only make it three chapters in before you decide that if this fic does in fact turn out to be a subversive masterpiece deconstructing the idea that sexually harassing someone will make them like you, then you'll just have to miss out on it.

It makes you feel a little nervous, a little uncomfortable, and very weirded out. But hey, you knew it would almost certainly make you feel that way, and you clicked on it anyway, so who's to blame? It's an age-old proverb, of course: "Don't like, don't read". 

You didn't like it. You read it anyway. You wonder how that affects the whole "Don't like, don't read" thing, since it's often hard to know whether you'll like it before reading it, and once you've processed the words you can't exactly un-read them. But, in this case, you were warned and you didn't heed the warnings. This is on you. 

There are fandoms other than the one where the twelve-year-old is shipped with the twenty-five-year-old, of course. There's also the one that is getting near constant praise for tacking difficult issues, though interestingly none of the praise is for tackling these issues well. It has such good LGBT representation that out of the three main female characters, there are four lesbians. Interestingly, every single lesbian relationship shown ends up being incredibly unhealthy, often in a way that is weirdly normalised. Speaking of unhealthy relationships, the show has also been praised for unashamedly tackling abusive relationships. There are three abusive relationships shown on-screen, one where it's incredibly unclear who's abusing who, one that was supposedly necessary for the abuser to learn not to be abusive, and one that the audience is expected to be okay with.

You stopped watching the show after you were expected to suspend your disbelief and sympathise with the main character's guardians even as they were comically unable to realise how traumatised he was, but you still interact with the fandom -- you feel like the show sort of went downhill over time, but the foundation is good and you like the characters, so AUs are always fun.

After you cut contact with a manipulative, borderline abusive friend of yours, you check the tags for one of the abusive relationships, since you can so heavily relate to the victim and some good old hurt/comfort might be helpful. You get too many results to realistically read them all, and a quick glance at the tags reveals that most of them are fluffy and wholesome -- did these people forget about all the shit she did? Oh well. You restrict your search in an attempt to find fics showing the relationship being abusive, and find a grand total of one that does so, sandwiched between one that presents it as healthy next to an unrelated abusive relationship and one that you didn't click on, but you're guessing based on the tags involves someone fucking a goose.

You know, as you do.

So, you write your own fic. You get out all your thoughts about the shit that happened to you, with some changes to allow for the fantasy setting. You make it clear from the tags and summary that it's not a wholesome fic, so shippers of the pairing should know not to click on it. After all, as the pro-shippers always say, "Don't like, don't read".

They don't like it. They read it anyway.

One commenter begins to harass some complete stranger that played no role in the fic's creation simply for leaving a positive comment. Another states that, by showing the main character as having stayed in an abusive relationship, you've depicted her as "some delusional abuse victim". They both state that you're _wrong,_ that this _has_ to be AU, that the character would _never_ do that. Which is weird, because she did.

It's also weird because your """friend""" would never do that.

And he did.

You delete their comments -- after thoroughly debunking them in the replies, of course, because if you don't spend every second of every day explaining yourself then you've lost the argument -- and add another chapter devoted to author's notes, consisting entirely of a lengthy rant about how you wrote this to vent and it's canon compliant, sandwiched between the obligatory "haha a whole chapter for author's notes, what is this ff.net?" jokes.

You turn back to Tumblr. You tell an anti-anti that while obviously harassment is bad, saying that the only reason antis see unwanted content is because they don't blacklist the tags is a bit unfair, since not only is it constantly untagged but some anti-antis get upset with people for not liking their ships. They reply, stating that what you interpreted as them shitting on you for not shipping it was _probably_ just them being defensive, since they've been so heavily harassed, abused, and ostracised by antis.

You wonder what the fuck that has to do with your fanfiction.

Your mind flashes back to all of the Tumblr discourse surrounding shipping. You remember that, sandwiched between several posts about how antis are the scum of the earth and should be killed, anti antis would post a disclaimer that being uncomfortable with problematic ships doesn't make you an anti. Antis are people who harass people; antis are people who abuse and ostracise anti antis; antis are people who post ship hate.

You wonder if this is what they think ship hate is.

**#4: Maybe Don't Even Use The Internet, Actually**

You're halfway through writing your seventy-thousand-word fanfiction when a complete stranger, with no account attached to their words but a name identifying them as "Madam Dominator", comments saying that while it's a nice fic, it needs a sex scene.

No, sorry, that's a misquote. They didn't say the fic needs a sex scene, they said _they_ need a sex scene. So you should write it. For them.

Who the hell is this guy again?

You reply saying that this is a _very_ weird comment and you _hope_ they're joking, because surely anyone who's old enough to want a sex scene is old enough to know that they're asking rather a lot, and check to make sure your age is in your profile. It is. In Madam Dominator's defense, people very rarely check profiles on this site, and nowhere in the notes or comments of the actual fic did it say your age. In _your_ defense, however, it's equally creepy to send sexual comments to adults you don't know, so maybe don't leap to remind them that it's not their fault.

You're scrolling through the comments of another fic, which is something you do when you want to leave a comment yourself but you're too anxious to do so, when you see them again. Madam Dominator. In this comment they're even suggesting ways to lead into the sex scene instead of just requesting/demanding its creation, which makes you feel more certain that they're not a troll. The author's replied telling them that they need to stop leaving sexual comments in the fic, that they're an adult and it makes them uncomfortable and they happen to know that the ever-classy Madam Dominator has done the same thing to a minor.

You're not sure if the author is talking about you. They might well be. You and the author are in what you consider to be a sort of "friend limbo", on roughly equal footing to all of the Tumblr mutuals that you've spoken to maybe once or twice through anonymous asks. You comment on each other's fics from time to time, and they offered you a link to join a server once, and you're not sure if that makes you friends or acquaintances or _what._ It's not hugely unrealistic to imagine they read your fic, scrolled through the comments, saw the unfailingly polite Madam Dominator's comment, and at some point prior to or after this checked your age in your profile.

You kind of hope they're talking about you. That's preferable to you not being the only one.

Madam Dominator's replied to the author's reply, stating that they didn't know onw of their comments was in a fic by a minor. Completely glossing over the author's very valid points about how unprompted sexual comments are likely to make anyone uncomfortable, they then go on to say that minors shouldn't have unrestricted Internet access in the first place.

You don't have unrestricted Internet access, actually. Your social media accounts aren't regularly checked, because you deserve some sort of privacy and also your parents would find the shit you talk about _incredibly_ boring, but you have to get permission from your mother before making an account on any social media, so that she can have some idea of how safe or unsafe it is. Reddit is off the table for its infamous misogyny, and Instagram is forbidden, based on an offhanded comment you made once that based on what your schoolmates talk about, you get the impression that if you did have an account it would mostly just be getting dragged into your classmates' drama. 

You're not too unhappy about this. As much as your father says that Reddit is a good site because it "has everything", you can't help but feel that _most_ social media sites that weren't built for one very specific purpose will naturally have a variety of content, and your lack of Instagram accounts makes it easy to get away with not talking to your classmates. Still, you can't help but find it interesting that it's assumed your exposure to sexual comments was somehow a consequence of your Internet access not being restricted enough, rather than something that happened because someone was busy throwing paper aeroplanes at the back of the room when their ninth grade health teacher first told them about consent.

You've seen this argument before, in reference to your annoyance at the near-constant exposure to sexual content online. People should be able to do and say whatever they want because it can't harm minors. It can't harm minors because minors shouldn't be online anyway. Minors shouldn't be online anyway because it's not safe for them to be online.

Why exactly is it not safe for minors to be online?

Oh, right, the sexual harassment.

Hang on. You feel certain that there's something paradoxical going on here, some sort of circular logic that holds up about as well as a house of cards when you think about it for more than a few seconds. You wonder what that could possibly be.

Riddle for the ages.

**#5: Remember that Antis Act, Anti Antis React**

Something you notice very quickly when you start to get involved in online discourse is the idea that everything antis do is completely unprompted, and that it's being done entirely to combat problematic ships and porn rather than in reaction to events going on in their life. The fanfiction about a ship being abusive wasn't made to vent about an experience or out of a liking for angst, it was written to show people why they shouldn't ship it. You're not arguing against the idea that "just blacklist the tags" will solve all of your problems because you're getting real sick of people blaming you for the stuff you've gone out of your way to avoid, you're doing it because you're a pedantic shithead that wants to start a fight. You're not writing vent posts about anti antis because you need to vent, you're doing it because you think they're bad people and you want them to feel bad.

The idea that maybe they _are_ bad people never occurs to anyone. You're hesitant to condemn the few good people that you know are part of their community, the cope shippers that create content only for themselves, and the people that post porn of adult characters and correctly tag it. But you can't help but feel that maybe some people _should_ be doing a little self-reflection about why, if they're adamantly not a pedophile, they so consistently choose child characters when there are so many adults available. Or why, if they would never condone abuse in real life, they condone it in their writing.

You're not saying that they _are_ pedophiles, or that they _do_ condone abuse in real life. Some of them are and some of them do, almost definitely, just because some percentage of the general population are pedophiles and do condone abuse, and logically the same percentage of fanfiction writers would do the same. Most of them, probably, are just regular old fanfiction writers that don't seem to realise how easy it is to normalise something. You just think it's a little odd that they're so adamantly defending their right to continue making content that has potential to normalise horrific things, rather than, you know, just not making it.

Anti antis, on the other hand, are assumed to have any number of justifications for what they do, even without context. The intelligently-named Madam Dominator isn't leaving sexual comments on minors' fics because they're a creep, they're doing it because they don't know how old people are, so really you should be stating your age constantly or just not using the Internet. The people leaving completely untagged sexual content in main fandom tags aren't doing it because they don't care who sees it, they're doing it because _you_ haven't gone to every individual blog that does it and sent a polite ask requesting that they tag "NSFW" images. The people shitting on your vent fanfiction for portraying a canonically abusive ship as abusive aren't doing it because they've spent so long ignoring the abusive behaviours they've forgotten it's not supposed to be healthy in canon, they're doing it because after so long of being harassed, abused, and ostracised by antis, they're defensive at the site of anti-shipping.

You can't help but raise an eyebrow at that. You can believe that they've been harassed by antis -- as much as you hate to admit it, a lot of people take it _way_ too far. You can take them at face value when they say they've been abused by antis -- there are some _real_ shitheads in the community. But ostracised?

Ostracised from _where?_ Tumblr is the only site you can think of where there's a vocal community of people who condemn pedophilia and abuse even in fiction. Even then, it often seems that no matter what key words you search for, there's ten pro-shipping posts for every anti-shipping post. Harassment and abuse can be perpetuated by individuals, but ostracization requires a community effort, and anti antis outnumber antis on every site you can think of.

You can't point any of this out, of course. That makes you a nasty anti, and since antis are harassers, it's completely fair that every anti anti you talk to enters the conversation with the assumption that you are personally responsible for all of the harassment they may have received. Weirdly, the idea that you're wary of them because you're still a little creeped out by the time a complete stranger demanded you write them a sex scene, or that you're skeptical of their "write whatever they want" ideas after your attempt at canon-compliant venting was accused of butchering someone's character, is something that they generally don't acknowledge.

So that's how you interact with fandoms without harassing real people over fictional ships. Resist the nonexistent urge to send vile messages to their inbox, an urge which anti antis assume you must have because the second you mention your uneasiness with the content they associate you with harassers and abusers. Blacklist the ship tags, and the NSFW tag, and a bunch of completely unrelated fruit tags that some people apparently use now, and maybe just blacklist _every_ tag because at this point that's the only way to guarantee you won't see unwanted things. Don't write anything deconstructing a ship, for any reason, ever, because if someone takes it personally then it's really your fault for being part of the community that hurt them. Maybe just don't go on the Internet full stop, because once you start writing stuff it's everyone's unalienable human right to demand a sex scene.

You've gotta say, it's not nearly as simple as you thought it would be.

**Author's Note:**

> before some dickhead starts accusing me of making strawmen for Disc Horse Points(tm): this all happened! a lot of it you can find just by looking through my other fics! some of it I don't feel comfortable linking to because it happened on my discourse blog (which I don't want connected to any of my other accounts for obvious reasons) but some of it I can happily send receipts!
> 
> I kept everyone anonymous (except the ever classy Madam Dominator, because (1) if you're going to send sexual messages to strangers and then justify it by saying they shouldn't have a problem with it unless theyre underage and minors shouldn't be online anyway then don't be fucking surprised when people aren't bending over backward to make sure nobody ever thinks badly of you and (2) they don't have an account attached to that name so nobody can harass them) because I don't want to risk getting anyone harassed but if you were/think you were one of the people involved in this then let me know if you'd like me to mention you by name.


End file.
